The Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon, a leading institution on the European visual arts circuit, has scheduled an ambitious solo exhibition by Carlos Bunga, a Portuguese artist who has lived and worked in Barcelona for many years.
Rui Mateus Amaral, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), curates the exhibition, which takes as its starting point one of Bunga’s surrealist drawings: La meva primera llar va ser una dona, 1975 (2018). The work evokes his mother’s journey, pregnant, from Angola to Portugal in 1975, fleeing civil war to save her two-year-old daughter. The exhibition has been conceived specifically for the CAM’s Nave, where the artist constructs a monumental forest of cylindrical forms at varying scales, working with fragile and ephemeral materials, as is his custom. The installation also engages in dialogue with CAM’s permanent collection through a selection of works chosen by Bunga expressly for the occasion.
Alongside the installation, an extensive catalogue has been published featuring texts by Rui Mateus Amaral and essays by several international authors including Roland Groenenboom, Omar Kholeif, November Paynter, Rina Carvajal and Catarina Rosendo. This publication has been made possible thanks to the direct collaboration of the Institut Ramon Llull.
Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) studied at the Escola Superior d’Art i Disseny in Caldas da Rainha. He lives and works in Barcelona, and his work explores the possibilities of form. What began as an investigation into the limits of painting has evolved into a practice that hybridises supports and surfaces, transforming painting into a space of activity.
His process recalls the experiences of conceptual and performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s, who employed simple, iterative gestures to generate sensory and emotional intensity. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Among his most significant recent exhibitions are his participation in the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – coreografias do impossível, and in Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana – Imaginant futurs.
Rui Mateus Amaral (Ponta Delgada, Azores, 1988) serves as Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA), where he has curated exhibitions by artists such as Alex Da Corte, Phyllida Barlow, and Carlos Bunga, among others. In 2022, he organised Summer, the first solo exhibition of Félix González-Torres in Canada, and in 2021 he co-founded MOCA’s triennial, Greater Toronto Art.
